Life is a process of Self-discovery. Embrace All of Life, for All of Life is who you are! As you embrace Life as your Self, you come to understand Life as yourself. Life embraces you gently and joyfully in return.

Contemplation / Reflection

Several years ago I participated in a number of “personal growth” trainings and workshops. At the time, after years involved in these activities, I sincerely thought, “I got it”. After all, I’d walked on fire, broken a board with one stroke of my hand, spent days in silent retreat, laughed, cried, shouted out any anger within and learned to love the least attractive (to me) person in the group, and to love myself. What more was there? I’d done it! Ah, the ego speaks! It wasn’t long before I learned the lesson of this Guiding Thought, Life is a PROCESS of Self-discovery. You don’t get to do it just once and be done with it. Because the only thing permanent is change, that means I also change, day-to-day or minute-by-minute. And that change is what All of Life is, everything around me, and me. To me, it’s like the idea of “enlightenment”. Maybe I’m not really “there” at all, but it seems to me that even an enlightened state is a process. Does it happen just once and last a life-time? Or does it happen again and again, what it means to be enlightened changing from moment to moment just like everything else in life? Now there’s another question I don’t truly have an answer to. So I continue to embrace Life’s process of Self-discovery, like taking this Journey of Courage. Today, it truly is a joyful journey, Life embracing me joyfully and lovingly. If I continue to rejoice in the ups and downs, the struggles and frustrations, I learn (again and again) to love the Journey itself.

Journey of Courage is now available as a free book.
You no longer need to wait for the Guiding Thoughts to be posted here daily–you may move at your own pace. This link will take you to the document in Dropbox; you may download it from there.

Become a Guest Contributor
If you think you might possibly like to be a guest contributor at some point for a future Journey (taking your next courageous step!), as Mary is doing now, please email me: susan@withpearls.com. We can talk. Smooth. Easy. No pressure. Just take that step and we’ll see how it goes from there.